SPECperfview 10

SPECviewperf is a portable OpenGL performance benchmark program written in C. It was developed by IBM. Later updates and significant contributions were made by SGI, Digital (Compaq, HP), 3Dlabs (Creative Labs) and other SPECopc project group members. SPECviewperf provides a vast amount of flexibility in benchmarking OpenGL performance. Currently, the program runs on most implementations of UNIX, Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Linux.

SPECviewperf parses command lines and data files, sets the rendering state, and converts data sets to a format that can be traversed using OpenGL rendering calls. It renders the data set for a pre-specified amount of time or number of frames with animation between frames. Finally, it outputs the results. SPECviewperf reports performance in frames per second. Other information about the system under test - all the rendering states, the time to build display lists (if applicable), and the data set used - are also output in a standardized report.

A "benchmark" using SPECviewperf is really a single invocation of SPECviewperf with command-line options telling the SPECviewperf program which data set to read in, which texture file to use, what OpenGL primitive to use to render the data set, which attributes to apply and how frequently, whether or not to use display lists, and so on. One quickly realizes that there are an infinite number of SPECviewperf "benchmarks" (an infinite number of data sets multiplied by an almost infinite number of command-line states).

The SPECviewperf CATIA results are somewhat perplexing. As a single-threaded benchmark, the only notable difference between the i5-750 and the i7-870 is clock speed. Even factoring in Turbo, that's only an 11% difference, while the results here suggest a 25% difference in performance. In all likelihood, it's the same software issue we discovered in Devil May Cry 4. Nevertheless, these numbers are good news for the Core i7-870.